There’s a little ritual I observe every time I step into Moe’s Books (which, everyone who reads this blog must know by now, is the greatest used-book store known to humanity). I walk up the flight of steps to the first floor mezzanine, take a few steps past the remaindered travel books, and turn abruptly to the right, which puts me right where any Sebald books in stock would be.
Usually this ritual ends with me finding a paperback of Vertigo or The Emigrants (and less often, Austerlitz, or least often of all, Rings of Saturn) waiting for some lucky reader to purchase, followed by me chuckling at the inevitable Alice Sebold books sitting adjacent to the Sebald. On rare occasions, there will be a little something waiting for me amidst Sebald’s four novels.
Such was the occasion last Friday when I bought my copy of Searching for Sebald, a 600+-page book of Sebald criticism liberally speckled with photographs and thus printed on extremely thick paper. (Terry at Vertigo estimates the weight is four pounds.)
By all appearances and accounts that I’ve found, the book is a trove of writing, photographs and art clustered around Sebald’s work. I’ve only had time to scan through it, but the essays look substantial, and the images are enough to draw in the eye and make it linger.
I’ll definitely be writing more about this later, but for now I wanted to mention that the book contains a number of photos of Sebald, which, to those of us who only know him through the same handful of author photos scattered among his books, are a revelation. Like all headshots, author photos tend to be claustrophobic experiences, and they tend to only emote in the same few basic terms common to the genre (e.g. “the serious intellectual”; “the friendly man”), but seeing these considerably more interesting photos of Sebald puts him in a new light. (For instance, via page 545, who knew Sebald smoked, much less with a long, black cigarette-holder?)
DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment